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Oop, bit late notice on this, but the latest Ephemera Society Bazaar is nearly upon us - the perfect place for picking up piles of printed goodness (stuff like this). It's this Sunday, 28 February, at Park Inn, 92 Southampton Row, London WC1B 4BH, from 11 till 4. See you there.

We just jumped across to the rather wonderful custom-lettering blog Lettercult from ffffound, and heck, it's hugely delicious, with a well curated mix of found lettering, logos, titles, and other random typography related stuff.

Buying fonts is generally a fairly functional affair: you do your browsing, click through the various registration and payment forms, get confused by a Verified by Visa screen that looks dodgy as you like, and then download a zip file. And that's it.

Obviously you then have a (hopefully) lovely typeface to play with, but when you've just shelled out a sizeable stack of cash, it can feel a tad... soulless.

So we were particularly chuffed to get a little package of loveliness in the post from Jeremy Tankard, having recently bought his delicious The Shire Types set of fonts. The pack contained the fantastic TypeBookTwo, follow up to the equally tasty TypeBookOne, as well as a CD master of the font, which is really welcome considering how often hard drives crash and burn.

The Shire Types "consist of six fonts in one weight... inspired by a time when England's middle counties were changing [they] bring together a heavy, solid notion of the Industrial Revolution mixed with ideas about specific localities". Which isn't bad.

Check out Tankard's typography.net site for more of his fantastic designs.

FOOTNOTE: We just want to apologise for the frankly haphazard nature of the spacing between images and text on this blog. It's some sort of Typepad glitch that springs up when you compose a post, and we're doing our darnedest to work out how to get round it. Any tips gratefully received!

Stack is a subscription service which sends you out a different magazine each month - you never know quite what you're going to get, which means it works as a sort of taster menu, encouraging you to try out stuff you wouldn't necessarily choose for yourself. They've got a fairly varied and independent list of titles so far, including Eye Magazine, The Ride Journal, Little White Lies and IdN. (If you already subscribe to any of the titles on the list, you can let them know, and they'll send you something else in its place.) There's a service for both the UK (you can choose from six, eight or twelve magazines, sent out one per month) and the US (six magazines per year, sent out bi-monthly over the year).

Each package comes with a magazine and a couple of extras - this month the main magazine was music mag Sup. To go with that was James Bridle's 'Immanent in the Manifold City' newspaper, produced through the brilliant Newspaper Club service (which we'll be writing more about sometime soon).

Some lovely stuff in the post this morning, including this rather tasty sample pack from image & type library Veer, which contains a set of six dry transfer sheets (you know, like the Letraset stuff, from the olden times).

The pack's been produced as a PR device to shout about some new typefaces they've added to their library (including Alejandro Paul's Business Penmanship, for which they've also created a bells & whistles flash page.) Though, oddly, the pack doesn't feature the new typefaces, but some of their older ones, including Rian Hughes' lovely Mellotron. But heck, free type transfers, we're not about to complain... and we've always liked Veer anyway. They just have a good vibe about them, and their copywriting hits that warm 'n' fuzzy spot without being too cutesy, which can be a tricky balance in a world where everyone seems determined to absorb the very essence of Dan Germain.

You can pick up one of the packs by registering with Veer. (Though only if you're in the UK or Germany - so bad luck to all our readers in Nauru.)

We've just finished putting the finishing touches on this brochure for The Historic Royal Palaces. They're the independent charity that looks after some of the most incredible places in London: The Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Banqueting House, Kensington Palace and Kew Palace. Surprisingly, they don't receive any money from the Government or the Crown, but rely entirely on visitors, members, donors, volunteers and supporters.

They asked us to design a brochure for their Adult Learning programme, which consists of a fantastically varied series of courses, talks and workshops at Hampton Court, Kensington and Kew - you can spend an afternoon making your own perfume, an evening learning about the history of gin (including a tasting session), or create your own roll of block-printed Georgian wallpaper.

We got a chance to spend some time at the palaces, which was brilliant, and shot a fair few images, some of which we went on to use in the brochure. (Check them out at Alistair's HRP Flickr set.)

We also created some hand-rendered text, based on their corporate typeface Farao, to use for bold headlines.

If you've not been to any of their palaces, or haven't been since you were a youngster, they're totally worth a visit. Heck, why not check out some of their courses?